


Reasons why Eddie Kapsbrak is gay

by Yaiza_trashmouth14



Category: IT (1990), IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28048539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yaiza_trashmouth14/pseuds/Yaiza_trashmouth14
Summary: Where I analyze Eddie KaspbrakCanon of book, 1990 miniseries and 2017 filmI will also talk about Reddie but it will be very brief
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Kudos: 10





	1. IT book

**Author's Note:**

> This take me 4 hours and I wrote this instead of studiying LMAO

I know that in this document I should not speak in 2nd person, but I don't care. I need to express one thing up front: I don't care what you are Eddie, that's none of my business, do what you want, because people said shit like, "He's gay but he's also an ace because gay sex is 'gross'" or shit about how "hard they were sinning" because of this gay ship, I'm tired. I'm fucking exhausted. So today, we're going to go over all the adaptations of It and our main man, Edward Kaspbrak, and why he's a gay man, a homoromantic homosexual, so to speak.

For starters, let's take a step back to Stephen King's original IT number one bestseller. This book is fucking huge my friend, a solid 1090 pages, in fact, and you know, that's a lot of room for queer coding, so let's get started. Eddie's first presentation to the public has 79 pages from the novel in the fourth part of the third chapter, "Eddie Kaspbrak takes his medicine." Shortly after his introduction, we received this fucking gem of information: "But in the end he had married Myra anyway. In the end, the old ways and old habits had just been too strong." This quote clearly states that, more than anything, marrying his wife had been a custom. Myra is compared to her mother many times and it becomes increasingly clear that this is not something he really wanted. But he had been back to his mother three times before they were married and Myra was his mother's best choice. It suited him, it was a habit and nothing more. Leaving the house to return to Derry, King says, "Was that what he wanted to say? That he had finally decided it was okay to love her?" , in the sense that when I was trying to be straight, it wasn't that difficult honestly, but it was easier when I didn't have to actively do it. It was okay to love the guys he "loved" when he wasn't around them because it didn't require work, he didn't have to show it. If Eddie is not around his wife, there is no proof for it, all he has to do is wear his wedding ring and say that he loves his wife.

Also in the novel, there is an obvious comparison to Eddie from the beginning, even before we meet him, and that character is none other than Adrian Mellon. Adrian is described as a small, asthmatic gay boy, and more than that, his boyfriend even calls him "my love", as Richie does to Eddie several times. I'm not trying to sway this towards Reddie because that's not the point here, but jokingly or not, Richie calls him that and King is an author, he knows that writing to Adrian and his boyfriend the same way Richie and Eddie writes will be read the same way. On the subject of nicknames, in the novel Eddie also calls Myra "Marty", which is clearly not a female name. Of course, nicknames are often unrelated to the gender of the person they name, but this is a bit odd that King includes nonetheless.

One argument that could be made is that Eddie had a crush on Greta Bowie in the novel, but if you read the section that mentions his crush, you can see some obvious queer codes. The novel reads: "He fell a little bit in love with her that day, her bright blonde hair falling over the shoulders of her culotte dress, which was a cool blue."

. Now just reading this might seem like a child's crush, but from a gay person's perspective, it reads very clearly about internalized homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality. At no point in the next paragraph do you notice anything about his other than his appearance. Of course he is 11 years old and falling in love at 11 is never real and is never based on personality, but nevertheless, the adult is the one who tells us this, and at no point does he mention anything other than his appearance. He also describes a man a page later and does so in much brighter language than the girl he is supposed to love. "Tony Tracker, big but somehow like a ghost, his white shirt glowed as the summer twilight approached and the fireflies began to appear through the air with their lace of lights ...". Of course everyone will interpret this differently, but from a gay perspective, that is gay.

Staying on the theme of the novel, we'll also have to take a look at Eddie's greatest fear. The first time he meets Pennywise, he sees a leper offering him a blowjob. This obviously fuels his fear of germs, but if we look deeper we can see clear parallels with being gay, even excluding the blowjob comment. The novel is set in both the 1950s and the late 1970s, both of which did not see homosexuals very well. Sonia Kaspbrak is also homophobic when she states: "Two men who bother to keep such a nice house must be fagots." and Eddie is not stupid, he knows what that means and can read that it is not good. Being gay at the time was often seen as a disease, something that was not born with you and that could be cured with conversion therapy and he was likely to know and internalize it along with his other fear of germs and disease. The leper is clearly a disease, but it is much more.

And completing our condensed queer coding of the novel, we end with Eddie's death. He ends with his classic closing words, "'Don't call me Eds,' he said, and smiled. He slowly raised his left hand and touched Richie's cheek. Richie was crying. 'You know what ... what ...' Eddie shut up. his eyes, thinking about how to finish and while he was still thinking about it, he died. Of course this could be interpreted as if he continued with his "Don't call me you know how much I hate that", which he repeats several times throughout the novel, and He has done it several times, but it is so clear if you read it that that is not what it should be read. If he has said several times "You know how I hate that", he would not have to think, like Myra, it would be a habit, King no I'd repeat that I was thinking twice, now there would be need. Before even saying his last words, King says, "But there was something else I had to say first." I've seen enough romantic movies to know what that means.

Something I'd like to add: Eddie's crush on Greta is that she was actually NINE at the time, not 11. Also, Eddie is a little scared to see her as a grown woman again.

He didn't want to see Greta Bowie with gray hair, thickened hips and legs from sitting a lot, eating and drinking a lot; it was better, safer, just stay away

The first half of the quote is infused with the strange sexist way King talks about women and weight, but the second half is intriguing. It could be argued that the chaste and almost dispassionate way the child Eddie thinks about his infatuation with Greta is due to his age, but the adult Eddie would not have the same excuse. Could it be that seeing a supposed childhood crush as an adult and feeling indifference or even disgust would push Eddie to confront why all of his feelings for women, except his platonic friendship with Bev, fall into those two categories?

And that's without going into how, ultimately, Greta's thing is like a page or two compared to her constant admiration for other guys. Or even how fondly he thinks of Phil and Tony Tracker, who are fairly accurately described as "a pair of lifelong singles" and whom Eddie remembers his mother calling "fagots."


	2. IT 1990

To continue, we will discuss Eddie's portrayal in the 1990 miniseries, for both children and adults. Kid Eddie is a bit more difficult to pinpoint specific queer coded moments as much of the novel was cut out and toned down for a family audience, but the most obvious is in his fear, just like the novel. He's afraid of bathing with the other guys, and if that's not the greatest gay mood, I don't know what is. Not only that, but when Pennywise taunts him in the showers, it's with the insult "Girly-boy". The actor playing the boy Eddie doesn't look particularly feminine either, just a little skinny and this is clearly meant to show something else.

It's so much easier to notice with Dennis Christopher's Eddie Kaspbrak. Not only is he physically a bit more coded as gay, affectionately called "the oldest young man in the world" by your people, but the way he speaks is somewhat stereotypically gay as well. 

"Near the end, the movie gives Eddie perhaps the closest thing to an introductory scene you can imagine (and it's more than King is capable of in the book, in which the scene doesn't exist). When Eddie and his friends are about to enter It lair for the second time, he confesses that he is a virgin. "I could never sleep with someone I did not love," he explains through tears, "and I have never really loved anyone ... except you. "And when he said it I look at Richie first, before the others. The ambiguity here seems typical of the historical moment in which the film was made; Eddie does not identify himself as gay and yet, reveals that he has been harboring a deeply personal sexual secret that he has lied about (in an earlier scene he claimed to be in a relationship with a woman). Eddie couldn't come out of the closet but at least was able to say that he had never been with a woman. And that his friends respond by gathering around him with their support, I know if significant entity. For a miniseries made for network television in 1990, that's something. "

But I wonder if this is where a lot of Eddie's headcannons come from.  



	3. IT 2017

To finish our look at Eddie Kaspbrak, we'll look at the portrayal of him in the 2017 film. Eddie in 2017 is much more feisty than his previous versions, almost matching Adrian Mellon at times in the way he speaks. He doesn't like this version and, unlike the other two, there is no grown-up version of him yet, but the boy is more than enough.

First of all, his shorts had a rainbow on them, thanks for that wardrobe department, I see you and I love you. But similar to the first two, the story takes place at a time that is not exactly friendly to the gay community, as Eddie himself mentions when he mentions the AIDS crisis when the Losers are helping Ben. This is not a direct call for him to be gay, but when you consider the context in which he found out about that, it is interesting. His mother was his source of information on HIV / AIDS, as he makes clear when he talks about his mother's friend in New York who got AIDS blood from a stepfather, showing that they have already discussed this in the past. I find this interesting as my parents never mentioned anything related to homosexuality with me in my life unless it was in connection with something that was said in church. I'm not saying that Sonia Kaspbrak assumes her son is gay, but considering the implications of that talk, I wonder. She could have easily told him to avoid blood for the whole thing, since that's how infection starts, but a part of me doubts it. Based on her characterization in the novel, she is likely to mention "the queers" and tell Eddie the whole thing. Obviously I have no evidence to back this up and I am only speculating, but I am behind it nonetheless.

Honestly, I don't have much to work with based on the 2017 movie, other than the fact that, as a gay, I found Eddie familiar, even if I didn't fully remember the original movie and novel. Eddie felt like me and it's not just his personality, but something deeper.

Stephen King wrote about Eddie's sexuality in his own way, avoiding the question as much as possible, and ABC gave Eddie something that King never did, even if he never came out as gay. But listen, Eddie Kaspbrak is gay.


End file.
